aptitude wrote:No, because apes is not a clade (monophyletic group), it is a paraphyletic group. It includes all members of Hominoidea excluding humans.

That's not really accepted as modern biology, is it ?

Check out the charts. The groups split and monkeys are still showing on the branch that humans are on; Old world monkeys. Monkeys split into new world and old world monkeys. It makes no sense.

How is it that humans are not in Hominoidea ?

wiki

For example, in a 2005 book, Benton wrote "The apes, Hominoidea, today include the gibbons and orang-utan ... the gorilla and chimpanzee ... and humans".[6] The group traditionally called "apes" by biologists is then called the "nonhuman apes".

It's not good to switch between allowing or recognizing something one minute, and then the next, denying it.

Are we not Great Apes, then ? Not Apes at all ?

Last edited by Crucible on Sun Oct 16, 2011 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Look at the first diagram under "Historical and Modern Terminology" in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape. The article states "In summary, there are three common uses of the term "ape": non-biologists may not distinguish between "monkeys" and "apes", or may use "ape" for any tailless monkey or nonhuman hominoid, whereas biologists have traditionally used the term "ape" for all nonhuman hominoids as shown above."

Yes, humans are part of the clade Hominoidea, but they are not part of the paraphyletic group of apes.

Yes, humans are part of the clade Hominoidea, but they are not part of the paraphyletic group of apes.

So not an ape. Not a Great ape.

This is not coherent thought - and it's not your fault, of course. I'm pointing out difficulties with your explanations as given you.

This, yet you said we share an ancestor with Chimp.

Yes, I believe this ancestor would still be classified as an Old World Monkey (an ape).

everything on that branch is both Monkey and Ape , but for some reason humans are not a kind of ape - as is every other thing on the chart. Odd that something not ape is coming from Ape. And it's JUST US that does it.

Somewhere after the common ( human /chimp ) ancestor which might have resembled Australopithecus (which was both monkey and ape), a split occurred, resulting in the removal of ancestry and the relationships involved, for one half of the split group.

Your point is completely valid and understandable. I actually agree with you, it seems somewhat inconsistent to call a common ancestor an ape and not humans. This is why biologists do not like to classify organisms in paraphyletic or polyphyletic groups, and just put them in monophyletic groups. So this question is mostly based on terminology rather than actual concepts.

That being said, I don't think that the transitional species between our most recent common ancestor and modern humans are considered apes, because by the definition of a paraphyletic group, "A group of taxa is said to be paraphyletic if the group consists of all the descendants of a hypothetical closest common ancestor minus one or more monophyletic groups of descendants (typically one such group)" (Wikipedia for paraphyly).

The reason why this question becomes difficult is because we only have one species of humans in the modern day; all of the others were wiped out. So it is a challenge to define the monophyletic group of Homo sapiens and all of the other "human species" in the past. However, I think that they still should be considered a monophyletic group. Once again, this classification is very artificial, and is more of a matter of terminology.

So by definition, our most recent common ancestor would be considered an ape, but we Homo sapiens, plus all the other "transitional species", would not.